Thursday, May 26, 2011

Put up a website. Took down the robots.txt today. Thought I'd tell you all first.

Now before you inform me--as Josh Reich did when I asked him to take an early look--that I should get a new designer, I'll let you know that I designed it myself. With help from my five year old.

Between being an investor and being an entrepreneur, the grass is always greener. I meet plenty of entrepreneurs who want to be VCs. I always ask them why. I love helping people start companies, but it's not the same as starting a company yourself. That said, I think I add more value investing that I do founding, so investing is what I plan to do for the next fifty years of my professional life (or as long as anyone will let me, whichever comes first.)

While I have resisted describing myself as an 'it' rather than a person, it's definitely still true that people attribute more permanence to an entity than an individual. Thus Neu Venture Capital, where 'we' invest. We is just me (ever since Softbank hired my awesome intern away from me by offering him actual money to do the work rather than just scintillating conversation.) Consider it the royal We, without the royal part. The Neu came from a conversation with a friend in which she insisted that my children preface everything they like with a subtle 'neu.' I scoffed at this until one morning when my youngest informed me that the White House was where President Neubama lives. I will not require all future investments to prefix their company name with neu, but I won't promise it won't influence my decision either.

I looked at a lot of VC sites while figuring out how I wanted it to look, and the one thing that was an absolute requirement was something I learned from my Omnicom days: the operating companies are what it's all about. So the home page--in fact the only page--is the companies I've invested in. There is a box of information about me (with my real picture, not my avatar: bonus!) and an entirely uninformative box about what I am looking to invest in (I'll work on it) but it's primarily about the companies I've invested in. I'm good with that in lots of ways. But mainly because if you're known by the company you keep, I'm in great company.